


Waste of Time

by QuintusHazard



Category: Snowbound Blood, Vast Error
Genre: Depression, Gen, but nothing warranting a relationship tag really, references to seshiri and cinshiri, that's literally it - Freeform, the only cw i can think of is a description of an nsfw meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26898448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuintusHazard/pseuds/QuintusHazard
Summary: Sometimes you feel as if you're wasting your time.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Waste of Time

**Author's Note:**

> I love how my first Snowbound Blood fic is just Mshiri being sad for 1.4k words. I was absolutely not projecting. I promise. Writing Sad Mshiri is just cathartic somehow lol

“The food tastes good, but the presentation could use some work! Good try, though.”

“Yes, chef.”

You could do better than that. You wrinkle your nose as you glance down at the radioactive sludge masquerading as ‘mac and cheese’ in your lap. You could have made your own mac, but you’re too busy as always. Microwave meals just have to make do in most cases, although sometimes you’re too exhausted to even make those, so you resort to a delivery of steamed hams, hot and fresh. Hot and fresh, your ass. Lukewarm and likely been sitting in the back all day. Old and dried out, just like yourself you suppose.

Your name is Mshiri Libeta, and you’re wasting your goddamn time. For the last ten sweeps, you’ve been on the back burner and if you forget yourself much longer you’re going to boil over. You spout out the self-care tips you read in tomes and scrolls, but have you ever actually applied them to yourself? Sure, you eat and you sleep as much as Corporate guidelines recommend, no more and no less. 

Can you ever really say you’ve been happy? You’ve been smug, you’ve been mildly pleased, you’ve been smitten, but none of those necessarily equate to happiness. You’re sure you might have been happy when you were young, but you’re not the one with Perfect Recall. You might have played and had fun with your peers in the schoolyard, but that was at least 15 sweeps ago. 

You let out a sigh and frown at the TV screen where eager young chefs prepare their next dish, and you can’t help but poke at your inferior meal disdainfully with your fork. It’s not gross, but it isn’t exactly a very hearty meal. You suddenly feel as if you can’t stomach another mouthful. That’s fine; it’ll keep. At least until it turns into cold, inedible sludge after all. 

And just like that mac and cheese, you’ve let your prime slip you by without much use. Sure, you have a matesprit who you never see and haven’t bothered bonding with yet because of a conflict in your schedules, and you have a moirail who hasn’t reciprocated any of the comfort you’ve given her for ten fucking sweeps, but that’s fine! It’s ok! You’re a professional TEMP, and you can just bottle up your emotions until you die! Nobody cares after all, especially not your clients or Corporate or any-fucking-body. It’s great, it’s peachy. You’re a mess, but you can clean yourself up just like you have been doing since you were hatched. The closest thing you give yourself to therapy is just listening to the SpongeBob soundtrack while seeing how long you can hold your tears in.

(Your personal best, by the way, is approximately seven sweeps and counting. You’re going for a world record at this rate.)

You get up off your couch, your joints yelling at you to get a couch which stands higher above the floor, and your brain screaming at you to ignore them. You, as ever, manage to ignore the argument of both body and mind as you shuffle over to your kitchenette and place the half-eaten TV dinner tray into the microwave to..

Why the fuck would something keep warm in a microwave unless it was switched on? You’re a dumbass who’s too used to the big warm ovens the mediators had in their temple. You settle with tossing the unwanted meal in the trash, barely managing to keep from tossing yourself into the garbage too. 

The TV switches over to some advertisements, and a sappy number comes on to promote a bottle of perfume. You almost break your personal best in not fucking crying when the two trolls on the screen gaze at each other adoringly over the glass vial of scent. What do you know, anyway? Those two actors probably hate each other’s guts, platonically. You know you fucking do.

Hey, why are you so nasty all of a sudden? There’s no place for anger in your profession, as an old mentor once told you. You still haven’t managed to separate work and free time just yet, convinced that Corporate are keeping their beady eyes on you and will probably fire off some happy-making mind control or something through the air vents if they see your frown. Now you’re just being paranoid, of course, but you’ve watched a lot of movies lately. Mostly, of course, because you haven’t managed to find your TV remote for two wices and you’ve given up on trying. Not that you’re lazy - far from it! - but it just hasn’t been very far up your list of priorities for the time being.

Damn, now you’re hungry again. You grab some random candy bar from your pantry and unwrap it, chewing on it in an almost critical manner. Caramel never really sat well with you, especially with how it sticks to your fangs, but fuck it! It’s the first box you lay your hands on at the store all the time, so you don’t care. What is there to care about, anyway? 

Of course you could say Secily or Cinare, but then again you don’t really feel in much of a caring mood tonight. Yourself? Oh please, if you cared about yourself you’d have joined a union or something. That’s too much work, still, and even though some friends of Cinare’s call you an unradicalized centrist, you brush off their comments with a tired nod.

The cooking show has come back on, and you pay it about half your attention. You have to admit, spaghetti car banana or whatever the fuck it is sure looks nice, but you don’t allow yourself to look up any recipes or make any plans. The closest you get to pasta is that irradiated shit food you just tossed. You forget momentarily that you’re eating a candy bar. You take another bite and frown, reminding yourself to get more toothpicks soon.

None of this narrative of a perfectly average evening is very exciting, is it? You’re sure whoever is privy to your internal monologue expected Secily to burst through the door, dripping teal all over the place, or for Cinare to call you up and offer to take you for a ride. The radical made mundane. The phrase swims around in your head until you convince yourself it was meant as an insult.

Your mind wanders to a meme Cinare sent you - an invitation, you later came to realise - of a photo of a car tangled in some overhead power lines, with the caption “I was doing good at driving n getting Head until shawty fucked around n licked my nuts”. You find yourself snickering quietly to yourself, then remember you never discussed Cinare’s intentions when she’d sent you that. You’re very neglectful as a matesprit, and you both know it. It’s not your fault, though, because you have work. It’s fine.

It’s cool, you realise, it’s great. You probably feel this way because you’re tired. You remember hearing one time that if you felt like everyone hated you, you were sleepy. If you felt like you hated everyone, you were hungry. You’re treading a fine line between “both” and “neither” at all times. You’re an expert in tightrope walking when it comes to your mental health. You are feral, unhinged and unmedicated, and you wonder how you haven’t snapped at a client and lost your job yet. There’s really nobody you can snap at right now but yourself, unless you fancied calling up one of your quads, which you don’t. You could snap at that harlot Secily insists on keeping around, or Oricka for putting a fucking bandaid on a concussion, and you’re even sure you have Necron’s number somewhere if you wanted to confuse and upset him with your pent-up middle-aged rage.

No, you can’t bring yourself to do it. You can’t bring yourself to reach out to anyone, even if you know you need help. You’re the pillar of strength; you’re the so-called “strong friend”. You can’t let your guard down or everyone will lose their respect for you. You know it! It’s fine! You don’t want to annoy anyone with your petty troubles such as You’ve Never Been Happy Once In Your Life!

...you really need to get some sleep.

You wander over to the TV to turn it off at the mains, and toss your candy bar wrapper in the general direction of the trash can. You still have some rotisserie cornfowl bones rotting away in there from yesterday’s meal, and it’s starting to smell a little. You’ll have to sort that out before your next client comes around tomorrow. You’ve got so much work to do.

Your name is Mshiri Libeta, and you just exhausted yourself pointlessly with an internal monologue for like 20 minutes. Nice job, asshole.


End file.
